Hugh Nibley Quotes - Page 2

All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.

A professor is not one who knows, but one who professes to know, and [thus] is constantly in the position of inviting challenge. . . . He professes publicly where everyone is invited to come and challenge, [and] at any time he must be willing and able to defend it openly against all comers. The degree is originally a chivalric device-a gauntlet of defiance to all rivals-and not a safe rampart or dug-out for a scholar to hide behind in safe immunity from any challenge.

Careerism is the determination to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.

Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else—Satan has us just where he wants us.

Every way of life produces its own environment and in turn is influenced by that environment.

Well, I have a testimony, I may be ignorant, but I am not lost.

In this crucible of wickedness the true greatness of Mormon shines like a star.

It is throwing our life away, to think of the wrong things.

Man's dominion is a call to service, not a license to to exterminate.

Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another.

At UCLA I quickly learned the knack of getting grades, a craven surrender to custom, since grades had little to do with learning.

The very helplessness of the public which makes it necessary for them to consult the experts also makes it impossible for them to judge how expert they are.

Wherever we look in the ancient world the past has been controlled, but nowhere more rigorously than in the history of the Christian church. The methods of control, wherever we find them, fall under three general heads which might be described as (a) the invention, (b) the destruction, and (c) the alteration of documents.

Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.

Joseph Smith could not have picked a better year to start The Book of Mormon than 600 B.C.